Cogito, ergo Latin – The Globe and Mail

Surprising how one topic seems to dominate a week, isn’t it? I saw this headline in Friday’s globular male the day after responding to a request from LB for a little help with a Latin phrase. This in turn had set me thinking back to my very first lesson in this renascent (RENASCENS -ENTIS), formerly dead, language.

The basement rooms at Sutton High School, on Regent Street in Plymouth (England), were dark. The windows gave onto a moat, no doubt intended to let the troglodytic pupils enjoy some daylight in the days of oil lamps and candles when the school was built, but which in late August 1956 barely relieved the murky gloom cast by the six dim electric light bulbs hanging from the lofty ceiling. That month was one of the coldest and wettest Augusts on record, but the form room for 2A would have been dingy on the brightest summer day.

As such, it was the ideal room for a bunch of thirteen-year-old boys. It was there that we wallowed in Elvis’s ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ and Johnny Ray’s ‘Cry’, and sang the cheeriest of blues with Guy Mitchell. It was there, too, that Mr Chapman (‘Charley’, behind his back) had us for our first class in Latin.

We didn’t stand when he came into the room, but all conversation ceased and we sat quietly and expectantly. He had the rapt attention of the thirty or so bright grammar school boys who had chosen Latin over Chemistry and who had therefore at the onset of puberty decided the direction of their academic careers.

Mr Chapman took the chair from behind the master’s table and placed it in full view of the class. Deliberately he sat in it. We wondered what was going to happen next as he looked around the class to make sure all eyes were on him. Then he stood, and said, ‘SURGO’. He walked around a bit, as he said, ‘AMBULO’. Then he sat down again saying, of course, ‘SEDEO’.

When I look back on that lesson (there was much more to it than Charley’s perambulations, of course) it now seems entirely appropriate that the very first word of Latin that I heard and learned (and saw demonstrated) was ‘SURGO’, which means ‘I rise’ or ‘I get up’. It is at the root of ‘resurgence’, which is what the study of Latin is experiencing right now. It is also the root of ‘RESURGAM’ (‘I shall rise again’) which is what was nailed over the door of the bombed-out church at the heart of Plymouth town, St Andrews, before it was renovated in the sixties. (Interesting to note that during the renovation some scratchings on a plaster wall were found that seemed to mark the return of Francis Drake from his circumnavigation – yes, from Latin, too – presumably made by someone stuck in the pew closest to the wall during the morning service when it was being bruited that the Golden Hind had just been seen entering Plymouth Sound from its voyage around the world.)

As a former occasional teacher of Latin I applaud its resurgence. I am especially glad that the first word I learned in Latin is at the heart of some of the most important lessons in life, such as getting up when you are down, or even seated comfortably, and rising above the things that pull you down.

Not least, SURGO is at the root of the words in which the Christian faith is based: CHRISTUS RESURRECTUS EST.